Court case management and property tax systems are government software that keeps two kinds of official record: court case files, with their hearings, orders and fines, and the property records from which local taxes are worked out and billed. Each is a system of record, the one database that a government treats as the official version of the facts.
The two look different, but they have the same shape. Each keeps a record for every case or every property, with a long history. Each produces documents that have legal force, such as a court order or a tax bill. Each must keep every change, with who made it and when, for decades.
Court case management comes first. In India, the district courts run on case information software built under the eCourts project by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). Each case gets a unique 16-character number, called the CNR number. Every hearing date, order and judgment is entered against that number. Lawyers and the people in the case can look up its status online, and the next hearing date is sent to them by SMS. In America, many county courts buy similar software from product companies, together with systems that collect fines.
Now property tax. A city's property tax system holds a record for every property: the owner, the address, the floor area, the use (home, shop or factory) and the zone of the city it is in. The tax is calculated from these facts by a formula that the city sets.
Take, for example, a city that uses a simple unit-area method, and say its rate for homes in zone B is ₹3 per square foot a year. A house of 1,500 square feet in zone B is assessed at 1,500 × ₹3 = ₹4,500 a year. The city gives a 5% rebate to owners who pay before 30 June, so the owner pays ₹4,275 if she pays in May. The next year, she adds a room of 300 square feet, after getting a building permit through permits and licensing software. The permit updates the property record to 1,800 square feet, and her next bill is 1,800 × ₹3 = ₹5,400.
The record matters more than the calculation. If the area or the owner's name is wrong, the bill is wrong, and the owner appeals. When a property is sold, the record must change to the new owner. Many Indian cities run property tax on open-source digital public infrastructure for cities, so that citizens can pay online by UPI. In American cities, it is often a module of the government ERP.
How are these systems different from a general case management tool? A general tool handles any piece of work that moves from person to person. A court or tax system follows the law: its record decides what a person owes, and when a case will next be heard.